The border crisis being exaggerated?

Members of the media listen as the United States Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson speaks during a press conference Monday June 30, 2014 in Edinburg, Texas. Johnson said he is sending an additional 150 Border Patrol agents to the Rio Grande Valley Sector to help with a recent spike in immigrants from Central America crossing the border through the area. (AP Photo/The Monitor, Nathan Lambrecht)

For the past few weeks we’ve been hearing about the flood of unaccompanied children coming across the southern border.

As we all know it’s a crisis but not everybody agrees with the way this is being covered.

“The claims by politicians make it sound like the half-million people who live in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas are in some sort of war zone,” says one commentator.

Reporter Jim Forsyth, talked with a woman who lives near the border in McAllen, Texas, “To think that it is affecting the way the normal person lives, that they’re seeing this all over in their town, absolutely not.”

And look who else thinks it’s not a crisis:

“My view is, we have to say, ‘Welcome to America, you’re going to go to school, get a job and become Americans.”
It’s conservative columnist George Will, and that’s what he said on FOX News Sunday.

Will even did the math.

“We have 3,141 counties in this country. That would be 20 (children) per county. The idea that we can’t assimilate the 8-year-old ‘criminals’ with their teddy bears is preposterous,” he said.

Children so dangerous, that when buses brought them to a temporary processing center in California, adults turned out, chanting and carrying signs, determined to protect their towns.

At one point, they surrounded a bus full of children who turned out to be Americans going to a YMCA camp. But you can’t be too careful. You know how swimming lessons can radicalize a kid.

Not to diminish a good crisis, and far be it from me as a member of the media ever to do that, but I thought it would only be fair to highlight the other side once in a while.

As the woman from McAllen sees it, “It’s a big misperception that is happening throughout the country.”